No Need to Apologize: City Tries a Little Boasting

Margo Sawyer, right, a sculptor, installed her work at a garage downtown. Her first impression of the site: We really need color.Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

HOUSTON — Yao Ming’s Houston is not Beyoncé Knowles’s Houston, and not just because the 7-foot-6-inch Rockets star needs two more feet of head room. George and Barbara Bush’s Houston is not George Foreman’s Houston, either, nor Dr. Denton Cooley’s, nor A. J. Foyt’s.

If this booming world center of energy traders, doctors and space scientists is hard to define, with a problem even worse than a negative image — no image at all — the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau has a remedy: a new television and print campaign called “My Houston” that features celebrities extolling aspects of their native or adopted city.

(For Mr. Foyt, it was driving 200 m.p.h. on the 610 Loop — back when the traffic wasn’t so bad; for Dr. Cooley, it is his “full schedule of surgeries.” And Yao — well, Yao likes Yao Restaurant & Bar where, he says, “I know the owner.”)

The campaign could not be rolled out in a lovelier season. Houston is ablaze with pink and white azaleas, and construction workers downtown are polishing a new $122-million emerald gem, Discovery Green, a 12-acre park with lake and restaurants, amid a forest of rising commercial and residential towers.

The testimonials fly in the face of a commonly acknowledged truth: that Houstonians themselves are among the city’s chief detractors, taking a certain pride in reciting their miseries and voicing astonishment, even chagrin, when newcomers and visitors say they actually like it here.

Houstonians “apologize for the city,” said Lindsey Brown, a spokeswoman for the visitors bureau who devised the campaign with Holly Clapham, vice president for marketing. “Why? I would love to know.” It could represent an extreme form of Southern hospitality, Ms. Brown said, “like when people say, ‘Oh, my house is so messy’; you point it out because you don’t want guests to feel they have to point it out.”

Other cities and states have tried variations on “My Houston,” but this subtropical metropolis of 2.2 million people, the nation’s most sprawling city, spread over 630 square miles — large enough to encompass Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Detroit — has a special burden: a reputation for banality, even ugliness.

Longtime Houstonians still shudder in recollection of the large yellow sign that once graced a used-car dealership offering unbelievable bargains alongside northbound Interstate 45: “Owner Has Brain Damage.” The sign is gone but there is still plenty to disdain in the billboard jungles that line the city’s intertwining freeways, themselves often gummed up with rush-hour traffic and construction delays.

Photo

Charles Sanders, an interior designer, showed off his garden as part of Houstons 73rd annual Azalea Trail.Credit
Michael Stravato for The New York Times

In 2004, a guerrilla marketing firm, ttweak, began boosting Houston with an unconventional campaign and still-popular picture book, “Houston. It’s Worth It.” A first phase listed the city’s “afflictions” — among them hurricanes, heat, flying cockroaches, mosquitoes and polluted air — concluding that the city’s many charms made living here worth the trouble.

It was not an approach favored by the Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We couldn’t compete with New Orleans and Chicago if we opened up with cockroaches,” Ms. Brown said.

The new testimonials, she said, grew out of a convention of meeting planners last year at which a 12-minute video, “One Day in Houston,” was shown. Viewers reacted to favorite aspects, exclaiming, “That’s my Houston!” and the name stuck.

Many stars volunteered their observations, although some demanded pay; they were not used. Of the several dozen who were: Clay Walker, the country singer, promoted the zoo and Texas’s biggest rodeo; Hilary Duff, the actress and singer, Mexican food; Oscar de la Rosa, lead vocalist of the Latino group La Mafia, cultural diversity; and the Bushes, the city’s big heart and neighborliness.

Certainly the timing seems propitious. Discovery Green, set to open April 13, offers recreation-seekers a striking new downtown amenity within steps of the George R. Brown Convention Center and Minute Maid Park, where the Houston Astros play. Even the underground garage exits are blocks of primal color, the handiwork of an Austin sculptor, Margo Sawyer, who said the city cried out for vibrancy. “Oh, my God,” Ms. Sawyer said she exclaimed at first seeing the site, “We really need color.”

At the same time, Hermann Park, the city’s largest central green space, is undergoing a $15 million restoration, including an improved 24-gauge steam mini-train with stops at the zoo, science museum and outdoor theater.

Last month, thousands of people visited some of Houston’s stateliest mansions and private homes for the 73rd annual Azalea Trail, sponsored by the River Oaks Garden Club. In River Oaks, the city’s toniest enclave, where the mansions of oil millionaires lurk behind screens of live oak and bamboo, Charles Sanders, a retired interior designer, offered tours of his 80-year-old forested terrain and fish ponds with koi, smiling when a travel writer from New Orleans reminded him, “Don’t forget to change the time on your sundial.”

Across the way, at Rienzi — the palatial former home of the arts patrons Carroll Sterling Masterson and Harris Masterson III that now houses the European decorative arts collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — the bulb garden was a flash of blinding paperwhites punctuated by blue Dutch hyacinth.

“Houston is not an easy take when you get off the plane,” said Rienzi’s director, Katherine Howe. “But once you learn to read it, it’s an incredibly beautiful city.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: No Need to Apologize: City Tries a Little Boasting. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe